The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (45 page)

There were yet more double-games afoot, according to the FIA. Investigators believed that Washington, too, chose to ignore the building evidence against Lashkar, wary of unsettling the Pakistan military whose support was needed to aid the US fight against the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda. David Headley was also tolerated by his sponsors in the US intelligence community, these same investigators believe, so long as he remained a potential source that might eventually lead them to the most prized goal in those days: Osama bin Laden.

These views have powerful backers among the French and British security sources, who told us about the dossier given to the Americans in 2007, warning of a new global terror axis with Lashkar at its centre.

Sajid Mir had come up on the radar of Western intelligence services as far back as 2003, when he began to recruit Caucasian and African converts, ‘clean skins’, to mobilize for future operations
that were in breach of Lashkar’s covenant with Pakistan’s military to focus solely on Indian-administered Kashmir.

In compelling detail, the European dossier explained how one of these operations involved a French convert recruited by Lashkar whose arrest in October 2003 exposed a well-advanced plot by the outfit to strike against a nuclear installation in Australia. This plot was one of Lashkar’s first attempts at an international spectacular. The French detainee’s interrogation led Western intelligence agencies to identify dozens more recruits like him in Europe and the US, jihadi ‘sleepers’ who were waiting to be activated to mount attacks that included ‘multiple raids on luxury hotels in London, and a strike on English synagogues’.

The report noted that Mir referred to his UK lynchpin as ‘Dukan’, an Urdu word for ‘store’. But as British detectives prepared to raid Dukan’s home, he fled. ‘Lashkar looks as if it will break apart or metamorphose into an Al Qaeda-style outfit that is trying its best to strike at US and British interests at home and abroad, with India particularly vulnerable,’ the White House was warned. Less than a year later, almost all of what had been predicted in the dossier came to the fore in Mumbai.

One month after 26/11, David Headley’s father, Syed Saleem Gilani, died in Lahore. Headley was out of the country but Pakistan’s Prime Minister visited the Gilani family home to offer his condolences. Headley mentioned this in an email to his Al-Qaeda-supporting friend Pasha, who attended Gilani’s funeral. Dismissing subsequent reports that the Pakistani government and Headley were in league, Headley’s half-brother Danyal issued a statement, saying the PM had visited out of courtesy ‘because I was his PRO and also because my father was a renowned broadcaster’.

In December 2008, there was a flurry of email correspondence between David Headley and Major Iqbal concerning the fallout in Pakistan from 26/11. Headley was worried that Sajid Mir and Pasha had both gone to ground, and he had learned that M2 (Faiza) and Chand Bhai were being questioned by the Pakistani authorities.
After receiving a message that
chacha
Zaki was likely to buckle if arrested and rumours that Pasha had also been ‘picked up by [ISI] counter guys in Pindi’ he ceased most of his digital communications. Soon, however, he was distracted by a new plot, the so-called Mickey Mouse Project, a plan to attack the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
, which had published cartoons said to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. Once again Headley was dispatched to conduct surveillance directed by Pasha and Major Iqbal, who both reappeared unscathed by Mumbai.

Headley was finally arrested at O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, in October 2009, en route to Pakistan. Although the US State Department would claim Headley was snared as the result of electronic surveillance connected to the controversial Prism programme, he was arrested after a British intelligence tip-off. Earlier that year he had travelled to the UK to meet one of Sajid Mir’s jihadi sleepers, who lived in Derby. In January 2013 Headley was convicted for his role in the Mumbai attacks. But after making another deal with the authorities, he was only sentenced to thirty-five years in prison and was protected from extradition to India.

Tahawwur Rana, his co-accused and former cadet college friend, was found not guilty of the Mumbai attacks. David Headley’s second wife, Shazia, and his four children still live in Chicago, while Faiza Outalha, his third wife, returned to Morocco. Washington has never formally admitted Headley’s role as a double agent, despite the overwhelming evidence, but family members told us they believed this to be true.

Indian investigators filed an 11,000-page charge sheet against Ajmal Kasab, who was found guilty of waging war and sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of India in August 2012. His plea for clemency was rejected by the Indian president on 5 November 2012 and, after he had made a formal request that his mother be informed, he was hanged at Yerwada Jail in Pune, at 7.30 a.m. on 21 November 2012, and his body buried inside the prison grounds.

After the attacks, his family had received a hand-delivered letter, written by Ajmal before he had set out. ‘Venerable parents! Today, Inshallah, I leave for Occupied Kashmir in order to fulfil my duty. The groans and cries of the Muslim brothers and sisters cry out to me . . . Life and death are in Allah’s hands, but no death is comparable to death that occurs on the battlefield.’

The remains of his nine co-attackers remained in the JJ Hospital morgue until January 2010, when they were buried at a secret location. None of the ten bodies were claimed. As Kasab feared, none of them were going home.

Both Headley and Kasab (as well as the captured Indian
mujahid
Abu Hamza) claimed that Sajid Mir
was
Brother Wasi, one of the handlers in the Karachi control room, overheard by the ATS. In 2011, Mir, who had used the pseudonym ‘Wasi’ in some of his email correspondence with Headley, was indicted in absentia by a US district attorney for conspiracy to murder in Mumbai, where six US citizens were killed. He remains at large.

Lashkar’s
amir
, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was arrested by the FIA in February 2009, along with Abu Al-Qama, one of the Karachi handlers, and Zarrar Shah, Lashkar’s media organizer and resident computer expert. Zaki is awaiting trial in Adiala Prison in Rawalpindi, where he is living well, allowed the use of a mobile phone and full conjugal rights with his wife, who recently gave birth. After 26/11, the ISI’s chief, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, visited him in jail, but vehemently denied any state involvement in the Mumbai attacks. Interestingly, the pseudonym Wasi was the nom de guerre chosen by
chacha
Zaki’s son, Mohammed Qasim, who died in battle in Kashmir in 2007. Abu Hamza, the Indian
fidayeen
trainer who taught the attackers Hindi, was extradited from Saudi Arabia to India in 2012, where he is awaiting trial.

The handler Abu Qahafa, ‘the Bull’, has never been identified. Nor has Major Iqbal, David Headley’s ISI contact, who recruited ‘the Mice’, his information gatherers in Mumbai, and who boasted
of an Indian double agent called ‘Honey Bee’. None of these sources have ever been found or identified.

In April 2012 the US government announced a $10m bounty on the head of Hafiz Saeed, the co-founder of Lashkar and
amir
of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, its parent organization, for his role in the Mumbai attacks. But Saeed remains a free man. When we met him in the outfit’s sprawling campus at Muridke, protected by legions of armed guards and checkpoints, Saeed was dismissive of the claims made against him, playing up to an audience of several thousand religious students graduating from the outfit’s college. ‘I am the West’s bogeyman,’ he said scoffing, ‘worth millions of dollars to someone. But I am not in hiding. I am here only, sitting with you.’ He combed through his beard, and then gestured with two open arms to his students, who cheered: ‘God is Great.’ Then Saeed stood, pointing to the heavens. ‘They have not come for me, from up there,’ he said, referencing the drone strikes that have killed so many in Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, ‘or from there.’ He pointed to the dusty lanes outside, evoking the extraordinary renditions that saw terror suspects detained and transported to CIA black sites. ‘And that is because America needs me to distract their people away from the collapse of their own country.’ Cheers rang out, as Saeed nodded in appreciation, shuffling out to the awaiting convoy of pick-ups, with their armed outriders, many of whom sported the same tidy, institutionalized look: Aviator shades, ironed khaki strides, army short back and sides and assault rifles. The recent assassination of the FIA investigator and prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali will ensure that the truth about Mumbai and Hafiz Saeed’s involvement in it will remain suppressed just that little while longer.

RIP

In total, 166 people were killed and over 300 injured during the terrorist attacks of November 2008. Thirty-three died at the Taj:

Vijay Banja – chef, killed in kitchens

Willem-Jan Berbers – Belgian-Dutch guest, shot while he was checking in

Senator Ralph Burkei – German politician and TV producer, died from his injuries after falling from a window

Gautan Gosain – chef, killed in kitchens

Chaitlall Gunness – guest, shot in room 551

Rajan Kamble – Taj engineer, shot in Chambers evacuation

Kaizad Kamdin – chef, killed in kitchens

Neeti Singh Kang – wife of Karambir, died in room on sixth floor

Samar Veer Kang – aged five, son of Karambir

Uday Singh Kang – aged twelve, son of Karambir

Hematlata Kasipillai – Malaysian woman, her body was found in room 637

Feroz Khan – killed while visiting an MP in the hotel

Ravindra Jagan Kuwar – security officer, shot in hotel

Andreas Liveras – British entrepreneur, killed in Chambers

Douglas Markell – Australian businessman, shot trying to escape third floor

Faustine Martis – head waiter in the Sea Lounge, killed in kitchens

Zaheen Mateen – chef, killed in kitchens

Michael Stuart Moss – Canadian GP, killed by pool

Gunjan Narang – friend of Amit Thadani, shot in cellars

Nilam Narang – mother of Gunjan, killed in cellars

Vishnu Narang – father of Gunjan, shot in cellars

Sadanand Patil – trainee manager, shot in head in lobby

Rupinder Randhava – teacher, killed in Chambers evacuation

Boris Rego – chef, killed in cellars

Elizabeth Russell – nurse from Canada, shot by pool

Sabina Sehgal Saikia – writer, died in Sunrise Suite

Rajiv Sarasvati – guest, killed in room on fourth floor above Will Pike and Kelly Doyle

Rehmatullah Shaukatali – head waiter in Shamiana, shot in restaurant

Maqsood Shiekh – killed while visiting an MP in the hotel

Rahul Shinde – reserve constable in SRPF, killed during exit from CCTV room

Hemant Talim – chef, shot in kitchens

Sandeep Unnikrishnan – Major from NSG killed in Palm Lounge

Thomas Varghese – head waiter, killed in kitchens

Lucy the sniffer dog – shot by the Palace lobby

A Note on Sources

There were many challenges in getting to grips with the siege of the Taj hotel. Crises breed confusion. People under fire or captive in a burning building can have wildly differing memories of the same events, making it difficult for us to build a reliable timeline with which to reconstruct events as they happened. Mindful of this, we interviewed hundreds of people for this book across four continents, and in ten countries: guests, Taj staffers, Special Forces, police, soldiers, eye-witnesses, journalists covering the attacks, foreign investigators, diplomats, and foreign and Indian intelligence agents (serving and retired), as well as many members of the Indian emergency services, including firefighters, ambulance drivers and hospital orderlies, along with surgeons and nurses.

Once we had amassed a dossier of views, we identified key scenes and then tried to build a consensus for each of them, matching the transcribed statements to hard data. Mobile phones were useful. Often a text message sent by a guest, a hotel manager or a policeman would lock down the disputed time of a particular scene. We recovered hundreds of text messages, and dated and timed photographs taken on phones, some of which we reference in the text, but the majority were deployed in the invisible service of anchoring events in the right time and place.

We obtained audio files and transcripts from the wiretaps placed on the gunmen’s phones from Indian, US and British security sources, the most complete to be assembled, which includes material never published before. They were translated and cross-checked as multiple languages were spoken, using idioms that were sometimes hard to pin down. We compared wiretap transcripts of the gunmen talking inside the hotel with the memories of captive Taj staffers and guests who were in the room with them as they took
advice from their controllers in Karachi, which enabled us to home in on the timing and accuracy of an event.

CCTV footage was also matched to events recounted in interviews. However, some of the hotel footage continues to throw up questions for us regarding the identities of two of the Taj attackers. Although the police remain insistent that Abu Ali was the attacker in yellow and therefore part of the front lobby team and that Abu Umer was the attacker dressed all in black and part of the Leopold team, we believe that the CCTV footage proves the reverse to be the case. In transcripts of the terrorists’ intercepted conversations with their handlers in Pakistan, Ali claims repeatedly that he has an injured leg and cannot perform his duty properly – police say he was hit by a ricocheting bullet when the gunmen attacked and killed the Taj’s sniffer dog team in the Palace lobby. On the CCTV film the only terrorist with any visible leg injury is the terrorist in black, who is limping, with one shoe off and a piece of cloth tied around his foot. If these two identities have been switched then all the trial court documents are inaccurate. We found numerous other inconsistencies regarding which gunmen were in which location, and photographs of the bodies of Abu Umer and Abu Rehman ‘Bada’ have never been made available.